👋 Howdy to the 465 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 27,652 strong tribe raising the roof together on the daily.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are of some of our recent editions.

🐣 Bite-sized strategy chirps: World’s Great Threads database.
📦 Becoming relentless: Our Jeff Bezos deep dive.
👀 Building in public: Athyna’s 2023 year in review.

If you’re interested in sponsoring these emails you can see our different partnership options here.

PARTNERS 💫

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Introduction to 2024

Howdy partner. Welcome to 2024. As we all get back to business as usual I thought it would be cool to tell you what you can expect in the coming year at Open Source CEO. And what we have planned for the future.

Firstly, let me caveat this by saying … none of this is confirmed. I have always loosely known what I wanted this newsletter to be but as my life, my work at Athyna, and my preferences change, so do my plans. Having said that, here are a few things to look forward to in the future.

Quality

The first thing you’ll see — fingers crossed — is increased quality in the writing overall. I have never been a write, but luckily for you and me both, I could always (kinda of) write. I believe one of the five primary jobs of a CEO of Athyna is to communicate at a high level. My job is to be Chief Storyteller. And writing is a big part of that.

My work in writing this newsletter, alongside my online reputation (I hate the term personal brand) means simply by repetition, the content you read will get better and better over time.

I also plan to be more ambitious around the guests we interview. The majority of our interview editions so far have been with early stage founders, I’d say Series A being the average. And I plan to change that in 2024. We’ll absolutely interview early stage leaders but we’ll also push more into enterprise.

And finally, the quality of the newsletter, from a value perspective, will also improve. The idea was always to have a newsletter that is the content would be vitamin, not a painkiller.

Value

When I say value, what I mean — I want this to be the first email that is starred in your inbox every weekend. I have my version of this. Every weekend I make a note to read Packy McCormick’s newest piece along with Chenell at Growth in Reverse, and Matt McGarry’s Newsletter Operator.

I read Packy because I find his writing refreshing but also quite dense. I feel smarter when I finish one of his pieces. Whereas with Chenell and Matt I, I learn something — every … single … time.

I am really proud so far of this newsletter. I feel it is equal parts entertaining and valuable. However, it’s not really me that is providing the value, it the guests we interview. I find the entertaining part much easier than writing content that is actually useful.

But I want to change that. Here is how I plan to do so.

Tools, resources & (soon) courses

First, we have dozens of tools & resources in the backlog, ready to let rip in 2024. The things I am more interested though is meaningful tools. Tools that are a complete set. For example; instead of giving you a ‘Pitch Deck Template’ we plan to have an entire ‘Capital Raising Hub’. The first two we have in planning are cap raising and leadership, but we have a number of other great tools in the pipe.

It’s clear to me from the thousands of onboarding surveys that tools and resources—things that actually help you get better—are the most valuable thing we can create.

Next are our courses. The courses we have in mind will fall inside of each of our five jobs of a CEO (more on that shortly) and will likely be on-demand courses, email courses. I love the idea of doing cohort based courses but because I am pretty busy being a CEO they are on the shelf for now. But we think we can add loads of value with our on demand courses.

The first two we have planned are around strategy and communications. One or both will be launch by the end of Q1 this year. Get excited!

*Here is an epic courses on email-based-courses I just did in case it’s interesting.

New content formats

Next we plan to add new content formats. And likely, more content overall. The first content types we plan to roll out are strategy breakdowns, ‘How Uber went from 0 to 1’ for example, and retrospectives. Retrospectives is a working title. The idea is to take businesses and break down how and why they failed.

We also plan, especially around the strategy editions to have a lot of guest writers to come in and collaborate. I am not the best placed person to talk about scaling a neobank, but my mate Dom Pym for example, is. *Dom is not confirmed to write a piece for us. Just an example unfortunately folks.

The Curriculum

The final piece of the new content puzzle is ‘The Curriculum’. This is what I have been planning to work on since the start and will be the educational side of Open Source CEO. If you know Lenny’s Newsletter, which focusses on product and growth, envision that - but for leadership.

The Curriculum, will mostly focus on the five jobs of a CEO - strategy, capital management, hiring, communications and accountability. We will have series’ that go outside of these areas but 80% of the focus will be on those five.

Expect them to be entertaining, but actionable. My wish is that these pieces become required reading for all founders, investors and leaders in technology. If you want to sign up to The Curriculum as an early believer (first 100), you can do so at a 50% discount forever.

Growth

Unrelatedly, but for fun, let’s explore, our plans for growth this year. Just like Mystic Mac in the UFC, I will start by calling my shot of shots for the next year here, today — and that is — my aim to get us from 26k subscribers to 150k before the year is out.

I am not sure how best to go about that, but we have a number of dialled in acquisition channels today that will scale nicely with us. Add newsletter acquisitions to the mix (we have done 3 so far) and we can get there.

What we will need though, in order to execute on this goal, is revenue. We have great sponsors today but we will need to add more revenue streams, starting with the courses, and following with the paid subscription.

But don’t fret … 80% of this newsletter, including The Curriculum, will be free, now and forever. My goal is to reinvest every penny we earn while I am still employed in my full-time role as Athyna’s CEO, which is likely for a while to come yet.

With that investment back into the product that is this newsletter we can build a huge community of peers, improve our content, create new products, launch our investment syndicate, create in-person-events and much, much more.

Closing

I’d like to close by saying, I really enjoy writing this newsletter. I am yet to know what writers block feels like and I truly sit down and bash on the keys with joy ever time I put a piece together. And it’s about thanks to you. I can’t do any on this without a set of eyeballs on the other side.

I mean, technically I could but it would not be anywhere near as rewarding for me. Thanks for reading, let’s take on 2024 together!

More building in public

• Building In Public - First 10k + WTF Have I Done?! - November, 2023

• Athyna 2023 Year In Review - December, 2023

And that's it! As a reminder, you can connect with me on LinkedIn here and Twitter (X) follow here.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Today’s tweet is from Ali Moiz and is a quick dive into how to pitch partners at a VC fund. Check this tweet and more in our World’s Best Threads Database.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

I read an interesting piece this week from The Intelligencer; Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder. Sure … this piece is the definition of a first-world problem, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

In summary, it’s the story of a VC-backed startup founder, stuck in entrepreneurial No Man’s Land. Somewhat of a story of time wasted - and passion lost.

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

I want to be a trusted resource for you. If you think anything I know in relation to brand, culture, global teams, sales and growth would help you unblock a problem in your weeks shoot me a line.

Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Notion. We use Notion for everything. Literally everything. It’s most important tool in our stack.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it from me. See you next week. 🫡